“Scrabble Marriage” by Lorraine Berry

Rob and I love a hard-fought game of Scrabble. We’ve become addicts—playing anywhere and everywhere—waiting to pick up Chinese food, at work, at the Laundromat. Those games are played on our iPhones. But the best games by far are just the two of us, bent over the Scrabble board, fingering our tiles, our toes touching underneath the table. For two people who are linguaphiles, love the way words feel on our tongues, offering those words, laying the wooden tiles into place on the board brings tension. Erotic tension.

These days, a game of Scrabble is foreplay. We approach it differently each time. Sometimes, I am brazen, playing words like “cunt” and “suck” and “sexy” and “turgid,” to see if the words on the board can get a rise out of him. We joke that I should have all the letters “c” and “q” taken away from me, because if I’m not playing “cunt,” I play “quim” or “quiver.”

I want to make sure that he knows where my mind is. It’s on his beautiful brain, of course, And it’s on that kind, lovely face: the blue eyes, the silver hair, the sweet mouth that has found so many different ways to bring me to orgasm that sometimes just looking at his lips makes me wet.

Last night’s game was full of fricatives, letter combinations that create turbulent breath, tiles whose sounds rub against one another, as my bare foot worked its way up his pants leg to touch his shin. “Nice word,” he said, totaling my points.

I watched him fit the seven letters, squeezing them close together in front of the “s” I had left dangling. I loosened the top two buttons of my shirt. “It’s too warm in here for me to think.” As I contemplated the rack of letters before me, I prized open each of the remaining buttons, and then sat there in a camisole.

He moved. No longer sitting opposite me, he was beside me, his letters turned at an angle away from my prying eyes, but close enough to feel the heat of his thigh as it rested against mine.

“Time out,” I said.

When the game resumed, I played a mediocre word. I licked my lips, tasting the traces of him, and awaited the Scrabble spanking he was in the midst of administering.

The game finished. 299 to 235. I wasn’t crushed. After all, I’ve beaten him several games in a row, a streak he puts down to the fact that he’s taught me to play the game as it should be played. With strategy, and distraction, and staring at letters until my forehead drops blood onto the tiles from the effort.

I started to say something. “You just hush now,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re done.”

We put the tiles away, our fingers touching as one of us folded the board into a funnel and the other held open the bag.

We’re in the process of moving. Boxes are everywhere, and he led me into a spare room that doesn’t get used much. It contains a futon, a desk, and a closet full of clothes. I headed for the bed in anticipation, but he stopped me. “Can you help me figure out which of these clothes I should send to Goodwill?” He was smiling.

“This is how you make things up to me?”

And yet, for half an hour, I watched him change in and out of shirts and pants. It was maddening: he seemed to take extra time to pull his pants up and down, fumbled with zippers, but pushed me away when I tried to help. I could feel myself growing restless.

I’m always restless around Rob. We’ve been together over five years, and yet, it’s not unusual for us to fuck several times a day, rolling around like teenagers. Still can’t keep our hands off each other. Still pass one another and reach out a hand to touch flesh, reconnect.

When I was at the point of exploding, Rob pinned me to the futon. Began with my lips and neck, and worked his way down my body with his tongue. I responded the way I always do: multiple orgasms that fall on top of one another. I’m vocal when I come. I grunt, and moan, and scream, and plead, and come close to tears. When Rob is inside me, the world comes to an end. It’s just him and me. No one else exists. Nobody else matters. It’s just flesh and fluid and the sounds of love.

Sometimes, I try to compose love poems to him while he’s touching me, but he always tells me to be quiet. He says it in a commanding voice that makes me even more hot. For someone who thinks too much, who speaks too much, having to experience sex quietly, take it in in the moment that it’s happening, changes the experience. I stop analyzing, stop interpreting, stop trying to figure things out. I just feel.

I am not passive during sex; suffice it to say that a woman who makes her living by producing words is quite adept at using her mouth to express her sexual love.

Rob has sent me a note that he has started yet another Scrabble. I feel myself close to him already. Silly game. But oh so serious stakes.

Lorraine Berry is an associate editor at TALKING WRITING. She is a frequent contributor at SALON and a Premium Writer at BYLINER, and has been published in DIAGRAM, FLAVORWIRE, and THE RAVEN CHRONICLES, among other magazines. She lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where, when not writing and playing Scrabble, she can be found hiking in the woods with her two dogs.